Does ChatGPT mean copywriting is over?
Skynet has become self-aware
Probably not.
There has been a huge spike in talk about ChatGPT, and most people who understand copywriting and what I do usually follow up with a question about ChatGPT.
Some people working in content might have started to sweat a little bit, because on the surface it looks like as of 2023, a computer is doing our job better than us.
But what most people are forgetting is that jasper.ai has been around since February of 2021, offering a much more refined experience than ChatGPT, and there were no mass redundancies then, nor any talk of writers becoming obsolete.
This current explosion has mainly been down to increased knowledge about how AI works, as well as ChatGPT being free to use and simple to set up, so everybody has started using it and talking about it.
Major Changes
The main changes that ChatGPT will bring about in the coming months/years:
Average content will be very easy to come by. Most basic writing tasks will no longer require a copywriter
Expertise will become more important, as now people will be able to obtain average copy about any subject
Writers will need to be more human and unique than ever
Search engines are likely to change
AI will mean that average copywriters will no longer be needed, which means that your unique voice will be as important as ever, because clean but robotic copy will be everywhere.
But one of the biggest drawbacks of AI is a copywriter’s greatest gift.
AI can’t write anything original.
The way AI works is essentially by scraping the internet for instances where the topic you want to know about has been written before. It will collect all this up and create a pastiched version of what you asked for. Impressive stuff.
But the issue is that if nobody has written about it yet, AI won’t know what to do. If aliens landed tomorrow, it would be none the wiser. It relies on human input to regurgitate information. It would need a human to see the aliens, write a news report and hit publish before it would even be able to say anything.
ChatGPT is also limited to September 2021. Anything after then it has no knowledge of, so anything relevant that happens now, AI cannot implement into the copy. Current events happen week in week out, and only a human can respond to them.
Furthermore, when AI does reach a point where it’s seamlessly real-time, you will still need someone to operate it. Perhaps copywriters will become ‘AI specialists’ or ‘AI content controllers’. It’s likely that the jobs we’ll have will just merge into AI.
ChatGPT is not always correct either, and can sometimes make some glaring errors that no human would ever make. The human eye will always be able to verify a specific detail better than a machine.
Worries about AI for the industry
As AI relies on human input, many bloggers, writers, and photographers for photo AI have raised the question: is AI using others’ work for free?
After all, creatives go to great efforts to produce content and post it online, and AI will simply scrape all of these into a new image or block of text, which the user gets for free.
It’s an interesting debate, and plagiarism with AI is something that we don’t have the answers for yet.
There’s also a worry that AI might make everything worse. The increased use of AI could potentially make people quit these professions. After all, what’s the point in writing all these articles if AI will do it in mere seconds?
The danger could be that the articles and text AI produced will become slowly more inaccurate and of lower quality. As more people will skip writing original stuff and use AI instead, the ‘food’ for the AI machine will become a lot thinner.
Imagine if aliens did land and everybody relied on the AI for information, instead of producing it themselves. AI would be no help at all and we’d be doomed.
Google Updates
For SEO copywriters, big changes are forecast, but not just yet.
Google’s interest in AI essentially means that one day their search engines could operate simply like ChatGPT. Instead of entering your search term into Google and it showing you a bunch of webpages, it is likely in future to answer your question straight away, much like ChatGPT, and then give you a detailed answer, likely with links to where it found most of the information.
This is good for the customer, but not the best for bloggers, as clicks are likely to plummet as people no longer sift through site after site searching for the answer to their question.
But on the flip side, it could rule out all the spammy content on the internet and hugely increase the value of tight-knit online communities, or ‘digital campfires’. The human touch on content will be brighter than ever.
Looking to the future
In my opinion, ChatGPT is a good thing for copywriters.
It makes our job easier, as writer’s block is a thing of the past, it means we can research even more specifically on a topic, and we will be forced to find a creative voice if we didn’t have one already.
But all copywriters should be using some form of AI pretty soon, as I said earlier, there is a chance that copywriting roles will merge into some kind of AI profession, one that we probably don’t even know yet.
And of course, I’m not insane – I did ask ChatGPT what it thought before I wrote this, and it agrees with me:
